Nicolas Sarkozy is a Gallic phony who won't do anything to solve the Calais crisis

Migrants walk next to a Calais' city sign near the "jungle" migrant camp in the French northern port city of Calais on August 12, 2016.Credit:
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP

As the notorious Jungle camp at Calais continues to expand remorselessly, its anarchy and squalor deepen. Now holding around 10,000 people, most of them young men from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the place has become a toxic symbol of failed immigration policies. It is a reservoir of violence, a threat to public order, a wrecker of livelihoods and a menace to one of the world’s busiest transport routes.

This destructive mess is entirely the creation of the French Government, working in league with the European Union. The camp would not exist if the oligarchs of Brussels were not so obsessed with open borders, and if France’s rulers were actually willing to maintain domestic security and enforce the long accepted international law on refugee status, whereby asylum seekers must lodge their claims in the first safe country they reach. Political correctness is a key reason for this feebleness. The French authorities would not tolerate for a moment the creation of a vast site full of neo-Nazi foreign skinheads who persistently caused mayhem to the public and businesses. There would swiftly be deportations, expulsions, incarcerations.

Yet instead of facing up to their duties, the French politicians try to heap the blame on Britain. This is despite the fact that the Jungle has nothing to do with us. Economic migrants from Afghanistan or Eritrea – and once these people turn up their noses at safe care not our responsibility just because they harbour a desire to live in our country.

But the eagerness to shift the Calais burden on to Britain has become fashionable in French political class, particularly among figures in the centre-right Republicains party. There is now a growing clamour for the abandonment of the bilateral 2003 Le Touquet Treaty, which established British border checks in France on cross-channel traffic. In place of this arrangement, the Jungle appeasers want the want the whole border control operation to be shifted across the water to Kent.

Foremost among the advocates of this change is the ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, who now proclaims that “those who want to cross to England should be processed in England by the English.” Sarkozy’s stance is ironic, given that, as French Interior Minister in 2003, he was one of the architects of the Le Touquet. The reason for his new approach is simple. After his humiliating defeat in 2012 at the hands of socialist Francois Hollande, Sarkozy has revived his Presidential ambitions. He therefore wants to pose as a 21st century De Gaulle, the champion of French national interests and the resolute warrior against perfidious Albion. His posturing against England is all the more aggressive because he is locked in a tight battle for the Republicains nomination with Alain Juppe, who has also demanded the repeal of the Le Touquet treaty. Given the deep unpopularity of Hollande, whoever wins the nomination is likely to be elected President.

Dynamic, vain and unprincipled, Sarkozy has opportunistically donned the cloak of resolute nationalism before in his drive for the highest office. In the run-up to the 2007 Presidential contest, he cynically took the votes of the insurgent Front National by adopting much of their uncompromising rhetoric on immigration and French national identity, so much so that he was known to critics as “the candidate for brutality.” At one stage, to the outrage of progressives, he described urban rioters as “scum”, but it was precisely that kind of tough language, along with his promises of free market economic reform, that helped him win the election.

Yet in office he failed miserably to act on his promises. He swiftly abandoned his agenda to boost enterprise and reduce public expenditure, instead sliding back into the paralysing Gallic tradition of massive state intervention. “Have I become a socialist? Perhaps,” he said. Nor did he do anything to curb immigration or promote integration, with the result that France has the largest, most separatist Muslim population in Europe. His weakness was symbolised by his decision to water down his plans to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, which had been one of his flagship policies before the election. “It was a remarkable U-turn on one of his ideological cornerstones,” said one paper.

Betrayed by his failures, voters threw him out in 2012. He is now seeking his rehabilitation, using the same old nationalist tricks as before. But his authority and credibility are shot. He badly squandered his golden opportunity to change France for the better in 2007. There was a yearning for reform then. Today, there is just despair and anxiety.

Nor will Sarkozy’s Calais scheme do anything to resolve the crisis there. In fact, it will achieve the exact opposite. The shift of controls across the Channel will ensure that Calais becomes an even bigger magnet for asylum seekers, just at a time when the migrant influx to Europe is continuing to grow, especially given that the EU border force now effectively acting as a ferry service from North Africa. A Calais without British checks would provide new incentives for people smugglers, while the abandonment of the current rules on asylum will be a bonanza for greedy British lawyers and shrill human rights campaigners.

The way to deal with the Jungle is through resolution and toughness on French soil, not by buck-passing dressed up as Gaullism. But Sarkozy is too much of a phony to articulate that truth.